The Demanding Indian Customer

If you have visited a Reliance store (the closest to my house is a Hypermart with a grocery section as well) you know how busy and messy it can get. Specially if you are shopping for vegetables, then it is a unique experience in itself. Sometimes I think there is more staff than the customers. Its hard to find plastic bags, and if you find some, one in every two will come apart without holding much. After you are done with all that there is the first queue to weigh your crop and tag it with stickers.

In this first queue confusion, ahead of me there was a guy with the kid. After weighing his harvest, he now wanted to weigh his kid on the measuring scale. The girl in charge there tried to avoid it by being polite and saying the maximum they could weigh on the scale was just 15 Kgs. Pat came the reply, the boy only weighed 7Kgs and hence it was Ok to put him on the scale. Putting him on the scale he did with the attendant having lost the argument with him. Off-course the kid refused to raise his legs to sit on the scale and hence no real weight could be ascertained, but I was happy that at least the queue moved on to the next customer.

But this threw up a few questions in my mind.

1. Did allowing the kid to be weighed bring the WOW to the customer service that everybody talks about?
2. Should the attendant have insisted that the company policy did not permit them to allow anything like that as they do in the western world?
3. Was there any better way work around the situation and would it have been worth it?
4. How demanding can the customer get and does customer expectation setting work in India?

If you have any thoughts, I would like to hear.